Why do ‘official’ climate scientists need spin doctors? Because they practice politics not science. Climategate like Watergate was completely undone by the cover up of disgraceful behavior disclosed in emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in November 2009.

The first 1000 emails included some selected to expose behavior unacceptable even without knowledge of climatology. Others show how the anthropogneic global warming (AGW) science was conjured. Exposure of CRU members was important because they dominated and controlled the major portions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Reports. The leaks achieved their objective of derailing the political program of the Conference of the Parties (COP) 15 in Copenhagen. The COP was in a bind because they’re starting point is IPCC science.
The University of East Anglia (UEA) hired Neil Wallis of Outside Organization to handle the fall out. Wallis, a former News of The World editor was later arrested in connection with the egregious phone hacking scandals. The emails exposed politicized climate science so political spin-doctors were required. University spokesperson Trevor Davies said it was a “reputation management” problem, which he said they don’t handle well. Apparently telling the truth was rejected.

George Monbiot of the Guardian who championed IPCC work and attacked ‘skeptics’, asked, “why was CRU’s response to this issue such a total car crash.” Simple, because they were deceiving you, the politicians and the public.

Spin-doctors organized two investigation panels that separated out the science and limited their investigation. The cover-up was transparent. Clive Crook, The Atlantic Senior editor wrote:

“I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause.”

Investigations concluded behavior was within normal interchanges and activities among scientists. It’s difficult to reach that conclusion reading the emails.

Emboldened by the apparent success of these defensive strategies those involved in the corrupted science believe, if you’ll pardon the pun, they’ve weathered the storm. As a result they’ve launched a PR orchestrated counterattack, evidenced by uniform phrases used by many people. One of these was return of the consensus argument. A recent survey by the American Geophysical Union (AGU) said, “98% of all scientists believe in global warming”. It was a contrived result that wasn’t a consensus in the real meaning of the term.

They can’t make new scientific claims because the hypothesis that human CO2 is causing global warming was destroyed when temperatures declined starting in 2000 and CO2 levels continued to rise. So they’re claiming the evidence they produced was correct.

Major evidence produced in the 2001 IPCC Report was the “hockey stick”. It rewrote history by eliminating the warmer than today Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Two problems, the MWP did occur and the data selection and statistical analysis used was shown to be seriously flawed. Michael Mann, one of the authors of the hockey stick and lead author of the IPCC chapter in which it was used, produced a book in February 2012 titled The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars. Two other independent committees reached the same conclusion that

“the original hockey stick was created by a biased methodology.”

Mann claims the findings are still valid and he and his colleagues are victims of orchestrated personal attacks. Unfortunately, the findings and methods are still invalid. More important the MWP does exist as hundreds of papers affirm. Mann brought a lawsuit against Mark Steyn who dared to say otherwise.
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The Antarctic ice core was presented as 420,000 years of proof of the assumption that an increase in CO2 caused a temperature increase. Within five years the relationship was proved opposite, temperature increased first. In April, 2012 Harvard professor Jeremy Shakun and colleagues claimed a re-examination showed the original claim was correct. It didn’t take long to expose the flaws here, here, and here, in the work.
Accuracy of the instrumental temperature record was the next issue. Phil Jones, Director of the CRU produced the second piece of the 2001 Report used to claim evidence of human impact on temperatures. He said temperatures had risen 0.6°C since the end of the 19th century, an unnatural increase. The error of this number was ±0.2 degrees making it meaningless. Jones said he had lost the raw data used to produce the number. Anthony Watts showed the US weather stations were of very poor quality. There was evidence of unjustified adjustments by official agencies that consistently reduced historical temperatures to enhance a warming trend. Claiming to resolve the problems Richard Muller took the original unadjusted data (not the raw data) and produced a temperature curve claiming it proved CO2 as causing the increase. He said it switched him from skeptic to believer. The trouble is he only used land base data and 70 percent of the world is ocean. Evidence of the PR campaign is the article wasn’t peer-reviewed and as Matt Ridley said,

“It appears to have been rushed into print full of errors to suit Muller’s self-publicity machine.”

Evidence of the new PR campaign is reappearance of phrases used prior to the emails. They were designed to limit experts to a discreet few “active climatologists.” The emails detail how they controlled the peer-review process to delimit who was “active.” The term appears in the AGU survey discussed earlier. It was often interchanged with “working climatologists.” The problem is “working climatologists” created the leaked emails and the incorrect science of the IPCC. These climatologists are playing the victim card. Mann and others claim they’re the victims of an attack funded by “big oil”. As he said in 2010

“We literally have the most powerful industry that ever existed on earth using much of their resources to smear the science and confuse the public about the adverse effects to our world of fossil fuel burning. History will look back most unkindly on industry-funded individuals and groups who sought to intentionally mislead the public about the reality and threat of human-caused climate change.”

He resurrects the claim in his 2012 book, but Joanne Nova exposed the truth.

“The money and vested interests on the pro-scare side is vastly larger, more influential, and more powerful than that on the skeptical side,” “Despite this highly asymmetrical arrangement, the skeptics are winning simply because they’re more convincing—they have the evidence,” “The other team avoid debate, try to shut down discussion (only their experts count), they imply the audience is too stupid to judge for themselves, and then call everyone who disagrees rude names. The dumb punters are figuring them out.”

Dumb punter awareness means the political battle is lost, which is causing government funding reductions. That’s why they are using PR practices to counterattack.